Best Defense is a comedy film

Comedy film

Comedy film is a genre of film in which the main emphasis is on humour. They are designed to elicit laughter from the audience. Comedies are mostly light-hearted dramas and are made to amuse and entertain the audiences...

 starring Dudley Moore

Dudley Moore

Dudley Stuart John Moore, CBE was an English actor, comedian, composer and musician.Moore first came to prominence as one of the four writer-performers in the ground-breaking comedy revue Beyond the Fringe in the early 1960s, and then became famous as half of the highly popular television...

 and Eddie Murphy

Eddie Murphy

Edward Regan "Eddie" Murphy is an American stand-up comedian, actor, writer, singer, director, and musician....

. It was released in 1984 by Paramount Pictures

Paramount Pictures

Paramount Pictures Corporation is an American film production and distribution company, located at 5555 Melrose Avenue in Hollywood. Founded in 1912 and currently owned by media conglomerate Viacom, it is America's oldest existing film studio; it is also the last major film studio still...

.

Plot

The movie takes place as two parallel plots separated by several years: Moore is an engineer developing a targeting system on a tank

Tank

A tank is a tracked, armoured fighting vehicle designed for front-line combat which combines operational mobility, tactical offensive, and defensive capabilities...

 for the United States Army

United States Army

The United States Army is the main branch of the United States Armed Forces responsible for land-based military operations. It is the largest and oldest established branch of the U.S. military, and is one of seven U.S. uniformed services...

 and Murphy is an American tank commander who finds himself forced to use the vehicle years later when Iraq invades Kuwait

Invasion of Kuwait

The Invasion of Kuwait, also known as the Iraq-Kuwait War, was a major conflict between the Republic of Iraq and the State of Kuwait, which resulted in the seven-month long Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, which subsequently led to direct military intervention by United States-led forces in the Gulf...

 (an unintentional foreshadowing of the Gulf War

Gulf War

The Persian Gulf War , commonly referred to as simply the Gulf War, was a war waged by a U.N.-authorized coalition force from 34 nations led by the United States, against Iraq in response to Iraq's invasion and annexation of Kuwait.The war is also known under other names, such as the First Gulf...

 that occurred six years after the release of the film).

The protagonists never interact in any way throughout the film. However a cut scene showed both Dudley Moore and Eddie Murphy together, but was edited out from the final film.

The film progresses as the indifferent and incompetent Moore slowly becomes more and more conscientious as he sees his corrupt employer falsifying test results on the notoriously unreliable system. This is interwoven with clips of the reluctant Murphy being forced into combat with a pair of ill trained Kuwaiti crewmen and the lemon

Lemon (automobile)

A lemon is a car, often new, that is found to be defective only after it has been bought. Any vehicle with numerous, severe issues can be termed a "lemon", and, by extension, any product with flaws too great or severe to serve its purpose can be described as a "lemon".-Origin:The use of the word...

 of a tank (the machine gun falls apart in Murphy's hands, etc).

The film reaches its climax when Murphy attempts to fire the main gun, which jams due to an overheated component ("The WAM's overheating! The WAM's overheating! What the hell is a WAM!?!"). Flashbacks then show the reformed Moore ignoring his bosses' orders to cut costs and making a sound engineering change to fix an anticipated overheating problem in the component ("Damn it, something on this tank is going to work!"). The camera cuts away to the tank's innards, showing Moore's fan turning on and cooling the component, and the AA rockets getting launched to save Murphy from an Iraqi anti-tank helicopter. The film ends with Moore and Murphy as heroes in their respective jobs.

Production and critical reception

Screening reviews for the movie were so scathing that the studio re-worked it and created a part for Eddie Murphy, who was at the peak of his popularity. Murphy's part was almost unconnected with the rest of the film and his character never even came into contact with the main cast. Eddie Murphy was credited as "Strategic Guest Star". Murphy would later joke about taking that role when he hosted Saturday Night Live

Saturday Night Live

Saturday Night Live is a live American late-night television sketch comedy and variety show developed by Lorne Michaels and Dick Ebersol. The show premiered on NBC on October 11, 1975, under the original title of NBC's Saturday Night.The show's sketches often parody contemporary American culture...

that his reaction to being offered the role was "What?! How dare you give me a script like this! Oh, THAT much money? Let's go!"

ABC

American Broadcasting Company

The American Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network. Created in 1943 from the former NBC Blue radio network, ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Company and is part of Disney-ABC Television Group. Its first broadcast on television was in 1948...

edited just 35 seconds from this film for its 1987 network television premiere.